Culturally-Based and Culturally-Biased Aspects of Knowing The Other
Culturally-Based and Culturally-Biased Aspects of Knowing The Other

Summary/Abstract: Interaction of cultures calls for cultural awareness development. Knowledge is a powerful weapon to overcome prejudices, stereotyping and xenophobia. To build cultural awareness and tolerance to the peculiarities of someone else's culture, global learners must learn how to determine the existence of differences between cultures and how to adapt their own behavior to a foreign culture. In today's world, many problems arise because of the errors in communication, because people feel impossible "to find a common language." Communicative interactions can be successful or can result in a complete failure depending on many factors: the availability of linguistic competence of the conversation participants, on cultural and communicative competence of the parties of communication event, i.e., whether or not they have common linguistic and cultural background knowledge and what is the balance between the common and different in their processes of perception and symbolic systems.

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